night of the living spaz 2

7/30/2019 Night of the Living Spaz 2

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Night of the Living Spaz 2:Reflections on a student insurrection

James Pollard354524

Submitted in partial completion of the Masters of Teachingat the Melbourne University Graduate School of Education.


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What is a teacher?

A declaration of interests.

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No true teacher is not always a student, and vice versa. An educational relationship is always arelationship between equals. Equal does not mean same. Two people in an educational relationship donot furnish the same resources: the same ideas, books, food, housing, education, money, drugs,experience, social capital or internet access. Two people do not always have the same tenacity, thesame compassion, the same sense of humour, the same memory, the same rationality, the samecreativity, the same patience, or the same humility. This thesis is made of cups of coffee, sleeplessnights, roast lamb dinners, spare rooms, spare cigarettes, listening ears, stern reminders, music andfilms, books, patient instructions, and love. Being a poor student, I've had to scab most of this off myteachers. My labour consists in making those things into this, a commodity, mine to appropriate as thealien residue of my life-process. I would be no communist if I didn't call bullshit on the idea of myentitlement to these results, and so, without wishing to spread the blame for this paper's many failings, Iwish to acknowledge a few of my teachers:

David Bagot, Alexander Brown, Michael Burns, Loki Campbell Type, Corinne Chambers, AlastairCooper, Jasmine Curcio, James Deen, Gai Doran, David Eden, Iain Elder, Terry Fulton, Mark Gawne,Andrew Grant, Alex Kakafikas, Lorika Kadriu, Oliver Lauenstein, Paola Masiera, Beornn McCarthy,Dorothy Meng, Connie Mileto, Keithie Rosenzweig-Oates, Sarah Oates, Alexandra Pollard, DavidPollard, The Pollards of Canberra, William Pucci, Juliana Qian, Luiz Riquelme, Benjamin Rosenzweig,Fazal Rizvi, Ramon Sailor, Marisol Salinas, Paisley Semrau, Elizabeth Thompson, Neil Thompson,Emerson Tung, Lucy Van, Molly Uzzell, Elsie Willis, Grace Willis, Jon Michael Willis, John MickWillis, Steven Wright.

to Freire1921-1997


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Introduction: The Vortex

An occupation is a vortex, not a protest.We are the Crisis

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I don't do deadlines. This paper is late. The completion of my degree has taken two yearslonger than scheduled. Along the way I've accrued late fees, paid rent late, and been late for everyconceivable appointment. I'm a day behind on my meds. I inhabit a swirling vortex of envelopesdemanding payment, attendance, and communication by yesterday at the latest. I throw out most ofthem sealed. My basic attitude to this climate is one of flight.

I'm bad with dates. I had to write down a timeline to determine that I dropped out in 2010. Iwas late organising my finances and found myself out of uni and out of house. I spent the winter in a

squat in the inner east, self-medicating for depression and reading volume I ofCapital, as well as Hardtand Negri'sMultitude. At the time Melbourne had no student movement to speak of. The mainsocialist organisers on campus were silent on the issue of student politics, and the most radical debateswere relatively insular ones about space and identity. I remember being in that basement office withMike and Lucho. I think it was 2010. We had set up a small computer lab and I read a then-recentarticle called California's perfect storm about the previous year's protests in California.1

In the Summer of 2009, austerity justified by crisis filtered down to the state level in the U.S.A.Governor Schwarzenegger announced deep cuts to education and other public services, while at thesame time further subsidising the state's prison-industrial complex. The education cuts were in turnprocessed by the school districts and the UC and CSU regents. 22,000 teachers laid off; deep cuts to

heavily casualised humanities departments (see Stanley Aronowitz for that old refrain); a 32% feeincrease in the UC system; and, to top it off, bonuses of up to 30% on six-figure salaries for the UCregents. No wonder the maelstrom of militancy: school-teachers, students and university workersorganised sit-ins at Sacramento, then strikes and demonstrations across the state including a wave ofsit-ins and occupations on university campuses.

California's perfect storm was the outcome of many currents. Over the following year, I beganto follow the insurrectionary anarchist current which had spread from Greece, in time with the wave ofausterity budgets. The 2008-2009 clashes with police in Athens, comprised of gangs of the poor, youngpeople, the unemployed, migrants (documented an un-) and anarchists re-ignited interest in globalanarchist communities in the idea of insurrection. In 2009, Semiotext(e) released an English edition of

The Coming Insurrection,2

a French pamphlet originally written in response to the anti-CPE movementand riots in the banlieus. New York insurrectionists, the Institute for Experimental Freedom, beganreleasing translations of French insurrectionary texts, laid out for printing in elegant .pdfs, during theheady days of the New School in Exile3, a series of occupations at City University of New Yorkbetween 2008 and 2009. From the banners and digital handbills of New York the insurrectionist

1 David Bacon. California's Perfect Storm. October 2010 on theragblog.blogspotSee appendix 2 for referencing unconventions.

2 I am not using the Semiotext(e) edition; this is merely historiographical. See bibliography for which editions of this, theCommuniqu, and other online texts are used by this paper.

3 New School In Exile. December 2008 on newschoolinexile.blogspot


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current fed into the Californian maelstrom.

Source: screenshot ofAfter the Fall.

The above image comes fromAfter the Fall: Communiques from Occpied California. The twoheadings divide the spread horizontally, and tell the basic chronology. The strikes and sit-ins of

September and October lay the groundwork for the November days: finally, Wheeler hall, November20th, the epicentre of the Bay Area occupations.4 As well as the horizontal divide, the two-page spreadopposes two photographs. The Wheeler occupation started when a small group of students seizedWheeler hall; they are pictured on the right, visually inside the vortex, implicitly in a communist futuremade present. Wheeler was soon surrounded by a police line. Those police were, in turn, besieged bysolidarity pickets, pictured on the left. Jasper Bernes analyses the occupation using TheorieCommuniste's metaphor of the glass floor: that is, the line seperating students as workers-in-formationfrom the workforce proper. Bernes argues that the double barricade of Wheeler hall, occupied andtwice besieged, revealed that the glass floor ... is more a hall of mirrors in which students meetthemselves coming, as workers-in-formation, where workers find, held out for them, their missingantagonism, and where both groups become, in the process, proletarians.5

This paper is an investigation of the idea of becoming proletarian through acts of insurrection.Its focus is The Communiqu from an Absent Future, a text released online by the anonymouscollective Research and Destroy in the summer of 2009. It circulated quickly among activists in theSan Francisco Bay Area and California, and then globally. After the Fallincludes it, and the latercommuniques cite its influence on the succeeding course of events (though the extent to which this isself-citation is anyone's guess). It is one of the better-known texts voicing an insurrectionary position

4 After the Fall, inside cover and page 19.5 Bernes inDiscount Tents. 169.


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in the Californian situation. It is my hope that it will serve as a window into my general object ofanalysis.


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The Method of the Antagonistic Tendency

This dye was selected because the bottle was within reach #overlyhonestmethods@themitcho

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Who wrote the Communique from an Absent Future? Research and Destroy did. Who are they?A collective of Berkeley graduate students, from what I can gather. They are anonymous. I'm similarlyignorant about the Californian union movement, Bay Area student politics, and a host of other issues.In many ways this estrangement is a barrier to investigation. But it is also a limit to be transcended:rather than trying to apprehend the text in itself, this situation forces me to realise that I can onlyapprehend the text by coming into relation with it. This demands a set of practices which constitute aproductive relationship. To this end I resort to what Negri calls the method of the antagonistictendency. Basing his work on Marx's dialectic in the Grundrisse, Negri describes three steps to thismethod. First, there is determinate abstraction. It consists in the methodic assertion that one cannotfound the categories [of analysis] beginning naively with the 'real' or the 'concrete,' but only on thebasis of the development of a 'process of synthesis' of the givens of intuition and representation. It is amove from the abstraction to the concrete, to the determination. In my analysis, the categories of theultra-left, insurrectionism, the economy and the commune emerge in discourse, as the names of livedrealities. This method implies an epistemological claim, that truth is an objective. There is noepistemological skepticism in this. Truth and meaning exist in discourse. Knowing is a collectiveprocess, of collective knowledge. The task of determinate abstraction is one of summarising theconversations of the class. From determinate abstraction, one works towards a theoretical construct:the tendency. One can only speak about the tendencies of a category on the basis of its determinateabstraction, because it is only by understanding a category relationally that one can grasp its motions.Negri calls this communism in methodology. That is, one makes a declaration of what is going onaround one from a specific location within social struggles. And consequently, one's declarations aresubject to the criterion of the true in practice: The 'true in practice'is thus the moment of thedevelopment of the category where the abstraction finds a point of focalization and attains the plenitudeof its relation to historical reality. This is similar to Levi-Strauss' instruction that a structure shouldmake all of its elements immediately intelligible. It is the dialectic's movement from the concrete tothe abstract returning to the concrete.

These are the criteria of analysis which have influenced the form of this paper. The paperbegins, concretely, with a summarised reading of the Communique from an Absent Future. Its pointsof contention are then used to locate it within a constellation of ultra-left texts. Insurrection, as apolitical objective, is located historically (determinate abstraction). Its tendency is described, based oncritiques emerging from other parts of the ultra-left milieu. Finally, the claims made about insurrectionare tested with reference to the situation in California. I conclude with attempts to locate myself inthese debates. If nothing else, it will help me understand why I'm writing a thesis.


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The Communiqu from an Absent Future: An Overview

A Manifesto always comprises an 'it is time to say' that blurs any distinction between what itsays and when it says it.Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy

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The Communiqu from an Absent Future is divided into three sections. The first is a reflectionon the subjective conditions of the graduate student today. Second is a historical account of thetransition from Fordist to post-Fordist production in the United States, and the consequences this hashad for the University. Finally there is an outline of an insurrectionary path towards social revolution,based on the occupation and communisation of spaces. Below I will briefly summarise the contents ofeach section.

In the first section of the Communiqu, the future's 'absence' is explained as economic: a

university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors.6 This is not hyperbole, evenbefore the bailout of the auto industry. TheEconomisthas reported:

A study in theJournal of Higher Education Policy and ManagementbyBernard Casey shows that British men with a bachelor's degree earn 14% morethan those who could have gone to university but chose not to. The earningspremium for a PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master's degree, which canbe accomplished in as little as one year, is almost as high, at 23%.7

The graduate student today trains for... what? - drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging namesand numbers into databases8 In terms of simple economic calculation, graduate school is a losing bet,for, meanwhile, what we acquire isn't education; it's debt.9 One could argue that students can acquireeducation anddebt without contradiction, but the crisis is also existential. We go through the motions

of our tests and assignments with a kind of thoughtless and immutable obedience propped up bysubvocalised resentments. Nothing is interesting, nothing can make itself felt. Marxist theory alone,of course, is no cure for existential despair:

We end up interpretingMarxs 11th thesis on Feuerbach: The philosophershave only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. Atbest, we learn the phoenix-like skill of coming to the very limits of critique andperishing there, only to begin again at the seemingly ineradicable root. Weadmire the first part of this performance: it lights our way. But we want thetools to break through that point of suicidal thought, its hinge in practice.

If this is true, there really is no point whatsoever to my writing this paper. The fact that I didn't for twoyears should serve as emphasis to the interested reader how persuasive I found this in 2010. One needs

a good bit of despair to attempt an insurrection.

Research and Destroy assure us of plenty of imminent despair. The collapse of the globaleconomy is here and now.10 An historical argument is deployed to differentiate this crisis fromprevious crises:

6 Communiqu 27 http://www.economist.com/node/177232238 Communiqu 29 Communiqu 310 Communiqu 6


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Beginning in the 1970s, capitalism entered into a terminal downturn in whichpermanent work was casualized and working-class wages stagnated, whilethose at the top were temporarily rewarded for their obscure financialnecromancy, which has itself proved unsustainable.11

This is a vastly simplified account of neoliberalism, which will be re-examined later. There is arelative consensus among much of the Marxist-influenced political scene about what neoliberalism is

and what the current crisis means for it. At this stage, it is more important to highlight two aspectswhich Research and Destroy attribute to the current crisis. Firstly, significant even if not terriblyradical, that it is a true systemic crisis in the sense that it is irreversible; the only way out of the crisis isthrough it with some sort of re-organisation of society. More impressive is the claim in the context ofthe university, the crisis is terminal:

Social programs that depended upon high profit rates and vigorous economicgrowth are gone. ... We cannot free the university from the exingencies of themarket by calling for the return of the public education system. We live out theterminus of the very market logic upon which that system was founded.12

Due to the severity of the crisis, they argue, and the inescapable and imminent collapse of the world'seconomic system, the university as an institution will soon be no more. Potentially, neither willcapitalism. The fact that today the economic crisis precedes the coming political uprising means wemay finally supersede the cooptation and neutralization of those past struggles.13 Canny readers willnote the reference to The Coming Insurrection and are urged to be patient.

Boldly the third section declares, We seek to push the university struggle to its limits.14 At thelimit of the struggle of the reformist unions for social-democratic pipe dreams, Research and Destroysee the possibility of anarchist-communist insurrection. They point to the possibilities which openedup by the recent anti-CPE struggles in France and anti-austerity battles in Greece. Despite thereformist slogans painted on banners and announced from podia, form was more radical than ...content.15 Occupations and confrontation with the police suggested the possibility of driving the stateout of the territory of the metropolis and remaking space into something new, a possibility and ananxiety which recurred during the Occupy Wall Street (etc etc) protests. Drawing on these examples,Research and Destroy advocate a strategy of mass occupation and the immediate creation of communes

as the creation of a momentary opening in capitalist time and space, arearrangement that [might sketch] the contours of a new society. ... While weknow these free zones will be partial and transitory, the tension they exposebetween the real and the possible can push the struggle in a more radicaldirection.16

The readers of the Communiqu are urged to abandon the political practices of the unions, the goal ofreform and renewed social democracy, and the practice of negotiation with power for piecemeal gains.Research and Destroy, instead, extend a hopeful invitation: We'll see you at the barricades.17

This overview of the text has been intended to outline the Communiqu's main arguments. Aterminal economic crisis has arisen (section 2) which can potentially stir disaffected university students(section 1) to acts of immediate class warfare (section 3). Unfortunately, the text proceeds at a

11 Communiqu 1012 Communiqu 10-1113 Communiqu 1214 Communiqu 1515 Communiqu 1716 Communiqu 1917 Communiqu 21


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breakneck pace. It appeals to emotion, and its theory is sketchy. To understand these arguments, andwhy they had such weight, one has to contextualise them. The next three sections are devoted to doingjust that, understanding the text in relation to the development of ultra-left theory since the late 70s.While a full history of that shift could fill a library, the Communiqu18sits at the intersection of severaldebates happening within global activist circles today which would benefit from even as brief anexposition as I can offer here.

18 Is it clear yet how much I enjoy typing, and seeing in type, the italicised word Communiqu? I didn't even copy andpaste when I cleaned up these footnotes.


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Education subsumed

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to facewith sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Manifesto of the Communist Party

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The basis of Research and Destroy's much abbreviated history of recent developments in globalcapitalism lies in recent Marxist economic theory. Similar views on neoliberalism, post-Fordism, orglobalised capitalism can be found in the work of David Harvey, Stanley Aronowitz, or David Graeber,all of whom propose fairly modest projects of renewed social democracy (with some variation). AMarxist understanding of neoliberalism also informs the ultra-left currents under examination in thispaper. To do due justice to the argument, I will return briefly to Negri's work inMarx Beyond Marx.First, because he sets the theory out more fully than Research and Destroy. Second, however, becausethe ultra-left emerged in many ways as a response to the experiences and failures of the Italianautonomists. In the Communiqu, two vital shifts in capitalist organisation are underlined as paving theway for new forms of struggle.

In the twilight era of the post-war boom, the university was not subsumed by capitalto the degree that it is now, and students were not as intensively proletarianized bydebt and a devastated labor market. That is why our struggle is fundamentallydifferent. The poverty of student life has become terminal: there is no promisedexit.19

In this section I analyse the two aforementioned historical shifts. First, there is subsumption: theprocess by which capitalist forms of evaluation and control incorporate preexisting forms ofproduction, laying the ground for the social relations and struggles which typify capitalism. Thesecond shift is a consequence of the first: as education's meaning is reduced to its exchange-value, itbecomes vulnerable to the same cycles of speculative overproduction and crash as other commoditymarkets. It is the concurrence of these two trends in the financial crisis which leads the writers of theCommuniqu to describe the current situation as terminal.

The theory of subsumption is drawn from Marx's essay Results of the Immediate Process ofProduction.20 In this text, Marx lays out two stages of subsumption. The first stage is formalsubsumption, in which the labour process becomes the instrument of the valorization process, theprocess of the self-valorization of capital the manufacture of surplus-value.21 Examples wouldinclude the transition from feudal relations of lord and serf to landlord and rent-paying tennant; fromthe guild system to wage labour. Subsumption here is the social shift from personal relations definedby birth to contractual relations, from the assymetrical rights and obligations of social superiors andinferiors to the supposedly symetrical rights of property-owners (of capital and labour-power) toengage in trade. By Marx's time, formal subsumption of the university had already occurred. Themedieval foundations of the university, along similar lines to monasteries, had given way to thecomparatively liberal practice by which a professor became a paid employee and the student became acustomer. However, as the metaphor of the ivory tower suggests, the university's traditions and

19 Communiqu 11-1220 Capital, Vol I. 948-1084.21 Capital. 1019.


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hierarchies remained insulated from wider shifts in society and in people's lived experiences ofproductive work. Despite the shifts which have since occurred in the organisation of universities, theidea of an isolated and semi-spiritual order still informs common perceptions.

The second stage of subsumption is real subsumption. This is a technical shift spurred by theimpetus to create relative surplus value, the category in Marx's analysis which gives capitalism its

incessant drive to revolutionise production. Simply put, absolute surplus value is attained when Iinvest some quantity M in a process, and create goods C which can be sold for a quantity that bothcompensates for M as well as leaving surplus S.

M -> C -> M + SS has a positive value. It is surplus in an absolute sense, and it can be increased by absolute increasesto S. Real subsumption occurs when simple multiplication of inputs and outputs fails to suffice.Instead, the drive becomes to maximise S/M, that is to create the greatest possible surplus for theminimal investment. A capitalist is then enriched not just by increasing the absolute quantity ofinvestment, but by increasing the rate of profit relative to social averages, by either cheapening orintensifying the labour process which creates C. Achieving this allows one to either sell the product Cat the average social value, the difference then being pocketed, or to pass the savings along and sellbelow the social value, thereby seizing a greater share of the market. This latter strategy forces othercapitalists to follow suit in reforming their production processes or go out of business (either selling ata loss, or failing to sell at all). If formal subsumption creates bourgeois relations in a juridical sense,real subsumption causes people to live these relations.

With the production of relative surplus-value the entire form of production is alteredand aspecifically capitalist form of production comes into being (at the technologicallevel too). Based on this, and simultaneously with it, the corresponding relations ofproduction between the various agents of production and above all between thecapitalist and the wage-labourer, come into being for the first time.22

Marx speculates, in teaching institutions the teachers can be no more than wage-labourers for theentrepreneur of the learning factory, but decides, such peripheral phenomena can be ignored whenconsidering capitalist production as a whole.23 At this point we are ready, in Negri's words, to carryMarx beyond Marx.

Marx's dismissal of education as a site of production, and therefor of struggle, ultimately restson his strict division between productive and unproductive labour. This distinction was based in therising hegemony of industrial capital, and let to certain political formations, i.e. the leadership of theinsurgent proletariat by a vanguard of industrial workers. However, Negri notes that the shift in theglobal organisation which occurred from the 1970s onward rendered this distinction, both of conceptsand political forms, untenable:

Productive labor is that which producessurplus labor. With this we are in agreement[with Marx]. The problem appears when we seek out where we can findsurplusvalue and what are its circuits of production. Now, when production andreproduction are so closely mixed one with the other, we can no longer distinguishproductive labor from reproductive labor. Productive circulation gathers, in theassembly line of social capital, all social work defined as directly or indirectly,immediately or mediately productive.24

In Negri's words, capital has moved from organising the industrial factory to thesocial factory. Allmoments of social life are now organised to maximise the profitability of capital, regardless of whether

22 Capital. 1024.23 Capital. 1048.24 Marx Beyond Marx: Essays on the Grundrisse. 183.


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they are formally labelled profitable or not. Like Marx, Negri is only able to describe an insurgentproject on the basis of contemporary struggles. This shift in perspective on what constitutesproductivity was based on the achievements of the feminist movement. Donna Haraway, in 1991,would attest to the advanced state of decay into which the old divisions had fallen:

If it was ever possible ideologically to characterize women's lives by the distinctionof public and private domains suggested by images of the division of working-class

life into factory and home, of bourgeois life into market and home, and of genderexistence into personal and political realms it is now a totally misleading idology,even to show how both terms of theses dichotomies construct each other in practiceand in theory. I prefer a network ideological image, suggesting the profusion ofspaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and inthe body politic.25

This theory easily applied to the student movement, as sites of reproduction, that is the production oflabour-power, became identified as sites of class struggle.

The key mechanism which formally subsumes students within capitalist relations, and thereforefounds the basis for their resistance, is debt. As the Communiqu puts it, students are proletarianizedby debt.26 Annie McClanahan has undertaken several studies on student debt and the key role itplayed in the radical currents of resistance in California. First, there is the quantitative side. Thefigures speak for themselves:

As of 2008, the average student loan debt carried by a graduating senior nationwidewas approximately $23,000, double what it was in the mid-1990s. The average debtof public university graduates has grown almost twice as fast as that of studentscoming out of private institutions. Low-income students have on average $2,000more in debt than others. During the last ten years, average U.S. college tuition hasincreased about 8 percent (three times the rate of inflation) every year. In the UCsystem, tuition has increased 300 percent since 2000.27

These figures tell us two things. First, there is the spread and increase of indebtedness; as publicfinancing for education and subsidies to student tuition decline, going to university in the United Stateshas become synonymous with acquiring debt, except for a very privileged few. Second, it points to thegrowing importance of student debt in financial markets. The private lending market grew from $3billion in 1997-98 to a whopping $19.1 billion in 2007-2008.28 This growth is consistent with overalltrends in the economy towards financial services, but also reflects special protections which the studentdebt market receives from the Federal government whereby all student loans are insured by the FederalReserve Bank, and student debt, unlike other types of debt, is not erased after a declaration ofbankruptcy.

Debt owes its transformative powers to its contractuality. The debtor's promise to repay is apromise to earn. More than any other measure this forces education into the realm of economiccalculation. The student is invited to become a petty capitalist, treating their own labour-power ascapital. They must borrow M to finance both tuition costs and the free time necessary to study; theyreceive some sort of degree which certifies that their labour-power has attained some status C; and theycan only pray that when they go to sell it on the market it will return, over the course of one's working

25 Haraway 1991. Cyborg Manifesto. Unpaginated. Available on Google; I used the EGS if you care.26 Communiqu 12.27 McClanahan 2011. Coming Due: Accounting for Debt, Counting on Crisis in The South Atlantic Quarterly. Spring

2011. 539-545. pp540.28 McClanahan 2011. The Living Indebted: Student Militancy and the Financialization of Debt in Qui Parle. Vol 20 No

1, 57-77. pp59.


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life, M plus some meaningful S. But as with all acts of capitalist production, there is an element ofrisk involved. There is always the chance that the market will not absorb C, at least not at the pricesone's predictions required. When there comes a crisis, capitalists are left with that stack of unsalable C,of useless shit. After all, a university dipoma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors.29

The crisis hits the student's financial calculations from both sides: cuts to education cause costs to thestudent to the rise; and at the same time these cuts, along with cuts to other public services and shut-

down of industry, reduce the expected pay-off. In this context, McClanahan argues, the absoluteunpayability of today's debt may be its most transformative property.30 The overwhelming debts oftoday's students summon them to refuse payment, to refuse proletarianisation. It is at this point that theCommuniqu calls for the total rupture: The only autonomy we can hope to attain exists beyondcapitalism.31

29 Communiqu 2 and 3.30 Living Indebted 58. See note on previous page.31 Communiqu 11.


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Insurrection

We're not depressed, we're on strike.Tiqqun

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Perhaps the clearest influence on the Communiqu from an Absent Future is the pamplet TheComing Insurrection, published by the French insurrectionary anarchist collective Tiqqun (publishersof the journal by the same name). In this section three main influences of Tiqqun on the Communiquare described. First, there is the image of the managed, cynical individual. Second, there is therejection of organisational mediations between the class and the revolutionary process. Finally, there isthe call for the formation of communes as the main tactic in a revolutionary struggle.

University is a place of self-expression and self-creation. In the eyes of Tiqqun, that's part ofthe problem, the source of existential despair:

Individualization of all conditions life, work and misery. Diffuseschizophrenia. Rampant depression. Atomization into fine paranoiac particles.Hysterization of contact. The more I want to be me, the more I feel anemptiness. The more I express myself, the more I am drained. The more I runafter myself, the more tired I get. We cling to our self like a coveted job title.We've become our own representatives in a strange commerce.32

Education has become a means of self-creation, but the self has become just another commodity forsale: individuality as the form of labour-power. As the labour market demands increasingly flexiblelabour, it is through our individuality that we demonstrate our flexibility. Recreation itself becomes akind of investment in being a fully rounded person. The Communiqu displays this alienation from theself: Those who came here to have our privilege notarized surrendered our youth to a barrage of

tutors, a battery of psychological tests, obligatory public service ops the cynical compilation of half-truths toward a well-rounded profile.33 Tiqqun describe governance today as a matter of management,brought about by overproduction and mass idleness:

On the margins of this workforce that is effective and necessary for thefunctioning of the machine, is a growing majority that has become superfluous,that is certainly useful to the flow of production but not much else, whichintroduces the risk that, in its idleness, it will set about sabotaging the machine.The menace of a general demobilization is the specter that haunts the presentsystem of production. ... This floating population must somehow be keptoccupied.34

Education is such a means of management; but today's education system was built on debt.

Nevertheless, given the hollowing-out of the individual, it is suggested that the decomposition of allsocial forms is a blessing. It is for us the ideal condition for a wild, massive experimentation with newarrangements, new fidelities.35 Research and Destroy stake their fates to the formation of suchfidelities on the barricades.

32 The Coming Insurrection 18.33 Communiqu 3.34 TCI31.35 TCI26-27.


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The Coming Insurrection expresses an open hostility to established political organisations. Theobjection it expresses is not to the content of these organisations' politics, but to their very form.

It's useless toget involvedin this or that citizens' group, in this or that dead-endof the far left, or in the latest community effort. Every organization thatclaims to contest the present order mimics the form, mores and language ofminiature states. Thus far, every impulse to do politics differently has only

contributed to the indefinite spread of the state's tentacles.

36

This sense of the uselessness of contemporary social movements is combined with a sense of urgency:The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of civilization.Tiqqun do not opt for the usual apocalypse scenarios (climate, or the slightly kitsch and outdatednuclear option), but instead point to our very situation as medicated, heavily policed world (they rejectthe very term society for implying more sociality than what exists37) as being already catastrophic. Theinsurrectionist programme is one ofimmediate action: not just temporally, but literally without politicalmediators. And the Communqu concurs: We are willing to work with unions and student associationswhen we find it useful, but do not recognise their authority. We must act on our behalf directly, withoutmediation.38 One is ankle-deep in the anarchist ideology of direct action now, which is simpler todescribe than it is to explain.

At UCLA, occupation attempts by ultra-left students were repeatedly stymied by the studentunion. An occupation statement on student-leader recuperation at Campbell Hall39 declares that ajunior political careerist derailed the occupation by chang[ing] the positive horizontality of thebuilding into a hostile-bureaucracy. One is loath to offer a judgement on whether Cinthia was, as theoccupation claims, race-baiting in an attempt ... to take power over the occupation, or whether shewas responding to real problems in the occupation's practices. In any event, Flores' intervention iscredited with the collapse of the occupation. More damning is the accusation that Cinthia and hermilieu

...had earlier sabotaged an attempt at direct action by a seperate autonomousstudent group. The group had planned for months to storm the regents [sic]meeting at Covel Commons. Cinthia and her gang of movement-police linkedarms in defense of the regents meeting, taking a load off the police, andthwarted the student group from rushing in to Covel.40

Again, it is difficult to be certain what the circumstances on the ground were, but here the physicalintervention of the movement police illustrates the depth of the divide in tactical orientations. Theinfluence ofthe Coming Insurrection is clear, but one should also highlight the influence of thecounter-globalisation movement. While graduate students in 2009 may not themselves have beenpolitically active in 1999, the echoes of the Battle of Seattle must have resounded through West Coastpolitical circles, not to mention the succeeding environmental and anti-war movements.41 Thesupposed common ground of those movements has in recent years turned out to be riven by deepfissures. Does democracy mean autonomy of action, or adherence to a single collective will? Is directaction an end in itself (shut down the WTO because it is evil) or a negotiating tactic (it's the only way

36 TCI63.37 Notes read That bit earlier. It's 3:30 a.m. and I have no idea what this is referring to you, so you'll have to take my

word for it.38 Communiqu 20.39 Post-occupation statement written in response to student-leader recuperation at Campbell Hall inAfter the Fall16.

During the occupation, Campbell Hall was renamed Carter-Huggins hall, in honour of local Black Panthers.40 After the Fall16.41 I grew up at a time when the West Coast was notorious for Earth Liberation Front actions against housing developments

on previously uncleared land, as well as attacks on S.U.V. Dealerships. Similarly, the activity of the West Coastlongshoremen in protest against the Iraq war is well known.


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that power will listen to us)? These conflicts played themselves out on the California campuses in2009. Research and Destroy are clear on their position. On the New York occupations, they say,

Many [who occupied] preferred to use the action as leverage to win reforms, inparticular to oust the school's president. ... [Some] shunned demands entirely.They saw the point of occupation as the creation of a momentary opening incapitalist time and space, a rearrangement that sketched the contours of a new

society. We side with this anti-reformist position.

42

The insurrectionary fervour with which the ultra-left sided with anti-reformist (i.e. revolutionary)politics is evidenced by its failure to build a coalition with moderate elements on campus, though this isnot to say that would have been preferable. But having broken with a moderate form of politics, towhat extent does insurrection deliver a radical content?

The Communiqu declares its political allegiance to the programme, strategy or technique ofcommunization All of our actions must push us towards communization; that is, the reorganization ofsociety according to a logic of free giving and receiving, and the immediate abolition of the wage, thevalue-form, compulsory labor, and exchange, declares the Communiqu.43 My use of multiplepredicates to describe communization is due to the term's contested status. On the one hand,After theFalldefines the communization current as a species of ultraleftism and insurrectionary anarchismthat refuses all talk of a transition to communism, insisting, instead, upon the immediate formation of'communes,' of zones of activity removed from exchange, money, compulsory labor, and theimpersonal domination of the commodity form.44 In Tiqqun we find a working definition ofcommunes:

A commune forms every time a few people, freed of their individualstraitjackets, decide to rely only on themselves and measure their strengthagainst reality. Every wildcat strike is a commune; every building occupiedcollectively and on a clear basis is a commune, the action committees of 1968were communes, as were the slave maroons in the United States, or Radio Alicein Bologna in 1977.45

Communes form the material basis of communism, as spaces of alternative social relations. It is notthe prefiguration of communism, but its entrance into reality. One has visions of Minerva leapingfull-grown and armed from her father's skull. Keeping with the avoidance of toxic and counter-revolutionary milieus, the emphasis is on small groups taking autonomous action. The long-termobject of this insurrectionary approach is the disruption of the geography metropolitan space.46

The rule is simple: the more territories there are superimposed on a given zone,the more circulation there is between them, the harder it will be for power to geta handle on them. [Various facilities] can all easily be used for purposes otherthan their official ones if enough complicities come together in them. Localself-organization superimposes its own geography over the state cartography,scrambling and blurring it: it produces its own secession.47

This secessionist impulse, the search for an outside to capital, is present in the Communiqu as well.Again, the occupation at the New School in New York is hailed as a momentary opening in capitalist

42 Communiqu 2043 Ibid (only one in the paper!)44 After the Fall5.45 TCI68. Echoes of Hakim Bey...46 Tiqqun's understanding of metropolis as a form of territoriality and control is fascinating, but outside the scope of this

paper. For my purposes, it can be understood as a regime of control which dissolves the urban/rural distinction, a kindof local instantiation of notions like Empire. See The Coming Insurrection pp34-41.

47 TCI72.


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time and space, a rearrangement that sketched the contours of a new society.48 Instead of massorganisation, Research and Destroy propose networks of interpersonal relations, insurrectionarycomplicities, which can multiply and expand these spaces. The generalisation of occupation is notthe old anarcho-syndicalist dream of the general strike; it is nothing short of global conquest. Excitingstuff indeed.

48 Communiqu 19


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Communization?

We want everything.Banner at CUNY occupation.

________________________________________

In differentiating the Communiqu's insurrectionary position from the communization current, Ihave thus far followed a distinction made by Benjamin Noys.

What we find 'in' communization is often a weird mixing-up of insurrectionistanarchism, the communist ultra-left, post-autonomists, anti-political currents,groups like the Invisible Committee, as well as more explicitly 'communizingcurrents, such as Thorie Communiste and Endnotes.49

This distinction is more than semantic. I have thus far tried to emphasise the immediacy of theinsurrectionary project. As another reaction to autonomous class organising, Endnotes and TC share adesire for immediacy. But immediate means different things in different contexts.

For Tiqqun and others influenced by anarchist prefigurative politics this

immediacy means that we must begin enacting communism now, withincapitalism. From the commune to 'commoning', from cyber-activism to new'forms-of-life', in this perspective we can't make any transition to communismbut must live it as a reality now to ensure its eventual victory. On the otherhand, TC and Endnotes give this 'immediacy' a rather different sense, byarguing that communization implies the immediacy of communism in theprocess of revolution.50

In this section I analyse the explicitly 'communizing' currents named by Noys, and some of thecriticisms their theories have furnished of Californian insurrectionism.

Endnotes critique Tiqqun's conception of subjectivity on epistemic and political grounds. First,they claim, Tiqqun uncritically present a voluntaristically conceived subject for which the totality ofreal social relations could only ever involve the mechanical unfolding of some purely externalprocess.51 This is the subject presented also by the Communiqu, the one for which demystificationis now a condition,52which needs only the tools to break through that point of suicidal thought torealise that the collapse of the global economy, as an external event, is here and now, and to thenact accordingly.53 For this epistemology, Endnotes argue, the world and historical processes can onlypresent itself to the subject as a monolithic, closed totality.54 The insurrectionist political subjectfollows as a consequence:

Not insensitive to the problem of this subject, The Coming Insurrection sets outwith a disavowal of the Fichtean I=I which it finds exemplified in Reebok's 'I

am what I am' slogan. The 'self' here is an imposition of the 'they'; a kind ofneurotic, administered form which 'they mean to stamp on us'. The 'we' is toreject this imposition, and to put in its place a conception of 'creatures amongcreatures, singularities among similars, living flesh weaving the flesh of the

49 Benjamin Noys' introduction toDiscount Tents 8.50 Noys 9.51 Endnotes, The moment of communisation inDiscount Tents pp32.52 Communiqu.53 Communiqu.54 Endnotes 32.


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world'.55

This is The Coming Insurrection's party of insurrection. The Communqu also invokes theinsurrectionary first person plural subject: We will not be so petulant, instead we will see you at thebarricades.56 Endnotes rightly question, do these pronouncements amount to anything more than theself-affirmations of a self-identifying radical milieu?57 Endnotes step out of this deadlock by positingsubjectivity as a by-product of capitalist production. The problem then is not the relation between the

subject and the something over there which oppresses it, but the set of relations themselves whichgenerate the subject.While our class belonging is unaffirmable a mere condition of our being inour relation with capital and while the abstract 'self' may be part of the totalitywhich is to be superseded this does not mean that either is voluntarilyrenounceable. It is only in the revolutionary undoing of this totality that theseforms can be overcome.58

But if California's situation did not produce a mass renunciation, neither were conditions suitable to therevolutionary undoing of the totality. The shock of the crisis and the united voice with which globalcapital announced austerity, coupled with the fragmented way in which its effects were felt, meant thatresistance to the cut-backs was no match for California's police. Endnotes argue that the occupiersturned to the Tiqqunist jargon of authenticity because of the very desperation of their situation:

[the] situation demanded resistance, yet without there being any sense thatreformist demands would be at all meaningful. Caught between thenecessity of action, the impossibility of reformism, and the lack of anyrevolutionary horizon whatsoever, these struggles took the form of a transientgeneralization of occupation and actions for which there could be no clearnotion of what it would mean to 'win.'

The question remains, then, why was there no revolutionary horizon to the situation, and what might aforthcoming one look like?

Both communization and insurrectionary anarchism formed as reactions to the breakdown ofthe political project of the autonomous working class. They are in agreement insofar as shifts inproductive relations have shifted the terrain of struggle:

The restructuring of the capital-labor relationship [began] in the 1970s and, forTC completed in the mid 1990s. If the post-war period captioned somewhatunsatisfactorily by the designators 'Fordism' and Keynesianism'- saw thesubsumption of workers not only as labor power but as purchasing power, something else begins to happen during the crisis of the 1970s. The producer-consumer submits to new (and newly repressive) disciplines in the advancedcapitalist countries countries: fragmented and distributed in networks, colonizedby rhetorics of self-management and flexibility, rendered part-time and pushedinto industries devoted to the sale, distribution, management and circulation ofcommodities (including labor-power).59

Where Thorie Communiste distinguish themselves is the relational terms they provide. Aspreviously mentioned, Bernes employs TC's metaphor of the glass floor to analyse the struggles at

55 Endnotes quoting TCI32.56 Communique, 2 pages. Again, another incomprehensible note I left for myself. But I'm pretty sure I cite the heck out

of these seconds earlier in the paper; It's 3:42 a.m.; and the entire document is only like 20 pages so you download andread it before I can find my copy underneath all the crap in this room.

57 Endnotes 29-30.58 Endnotes 32-33.59 Bernes 161.


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the university of California. There, he claims, we see the struggles of a post-proletariat politicallystrangled by its physical distance from the means of production of life. The 'hidden abode ofproduction' is not so much invisible as inaccessible covered by a glass floor. And in the 'noisy sphereof circulation' the noises we hear are those of the riot. The collapse of an autonomous worker's identityis an effect of this fragmentation.60 This is not to say that communization discards the theory of theproletariat, but they return it to (arguably) its original role in Marxism: self-abolition. The proletariat

in itself is nothing, but a nothing full of social relations: against capital, the proletariat has no prospectbut its disappearance.61 Communization occurs when workers cease to be workers; that is, whenlabour-power ceases to be a commodity (and so does everything else). This requires dissolving therelationships which constitute us as individual subjects, which constitute labour as a commodity, andwhich construct nature as the alien environment. The necessity with which the communist revolutionis faced consists not in modifying the share between wages and profit, but in abolishing the capitalistnature of the accumulated means of production.62 It is the attack on the built environment that rendersquestions of University struggles important, argues Bernes:

Alongside the political logic of opening [i.e. campaigns for greater access ed],one finds, also, familiar figures of closure, negation and refusal picket linesencircling campus, buildings barricaded, sabotage of university property, smallriots tactics aimed not at transformation but suspension and disruption, tacticsthat aim to bring the university's activities to a halt, rather than replace themwith another set of activities.

The precariously solvent students leading the occupations act here as stand-ins for a more general'marginal' figure the unemployed, the partially employed, all those who are antagonistic to the currentorder but must fight outside of the point of production63 Hence Bernes is optimistic that in a momentof the UC struggles the students and workers collectively became proletarians. Students arepresented almost as a vanguard, opening possibilities for struggle in the post-modern age.

60 Bernes 162.61 Theorie Communiste. Self-organisation is the first act of the revolution; it then becomes an obstacle which the

revoluiton has to overcome. 37. The text is available through the TC in English section of theoriecommuniste.org. Iused the pdf, naturally.

62 TC 4063 Bernes 169.


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Truth in Practice

Because communism is good in theory.

________________________________________

For Endnotes, communization theory is a scathing indictment of insurrectionary practice. ForBernes, it is a validation. To sort through this difficulty, I rely on two sets of theoretical tools. First,leaving differences of interpretation aside, Theorie Communiste seem to offer a useful heuristic forevaluation the communist content of struggles: a form of struggle is communist insofar as it dissolvesthe relations which constitute us as subjects within capital, including the wage relation, race and genderrelations, and the relation between human and environment. Furthermore, one says that a form ofstruggle to reaches its limit when its organising principles become a drive to the preservation of a set ofrelationships constituting an identity. This is all well and good, but from these abstract principles onecan either suggest that insurrection offers a glimmer of true proletarian politics or that it's a self-indulgent declaration without any meaningful political consequences; both of these explanations strikeme as being overly simplistic. So, to accompany TC's principles I want to bring back Negri's

antagonistic tendency. Negri's work allows us to take a dialectic view of the differences betweenBernes and Endnotes: they both represent possible outcomes, or tendencies, within insurrectionarytheory. Bernes is correct that sometimes, when people come together in resistance, their differencesdrop away and for a moment a collective refusal asserts itself. And Endnotes is correct that thesemoments do not come about simply by declaring them, no matter how eloquent the declaration. Theproblem for us is then is to decide under what circumstances, from what embodied perspectives, areEndnotes or Bernes correct? Negri would ask which position is true in practice (and in which practices,perhaps); TCmight ask where the limits of insurrectionary politics lie. Having moved from thespecifics of the events at UC to the abstractions of insurrection and communization, I wish to concludewith a return to the concrete. In this section I will explore a criticism of the occupation which emergedfrom within the Bay Area radical scene: Deluche's Letter to a White Student Movement.64

Deluche, perhaps giving the lie to his introductory claim that the letter was not meant to betaken in a confrontational spirit, lampoons the voluntaristic radicalism of the Berkeley occupiers. Thefatalistic, all-or-nothing confrontation which the occupiers entered against the University and, byextension, the state, was a choice which only the privileged could make.

We have chosen not to die has been the motto of the occupationist. As hestorms buildings, as he rushes into battles in street against police, as hedamages property in a drug induced haze, he screams we have chosen not todie. In the morning, when the dust settles and the sun rises he lays bruised inbed. Looking onto a new day.

we have chosen not to die seems to be the rallying cry that kept them throughthe night.

He lays with a smile, oblivious to the fact that the threat of his death was nevera reality. Privilege, class and race have proven to be buffers from trueoppression. His white skin has kept him through the night and the politics thathe believed he risked his life for now are now over shadowed by the mountain

64A letter to the white student movement by Deluche. childrenofmalcolm.wordpress.com, March 2010.


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of over turned trash cans and broken glass on Telegraph Ave. Adventurism isthe privilege of the white college student and the burden of the Black collegestudent seeking to unite people of color in the struggle.65

An excellent theory, troubled only by the fact that not all of the occupiers were white men. Delucheadmits and dismisses this fact, saying that the letter is targeted at the attitude and spirit of the actions,which has come from a place of societal privilege. For respondants writing as the Invisible Women

Committee, this is far from satisfactory. Countering parody with parody, they write, On the night Ichose not to die... I was a woman of color.66 Deluche, the IWC claims, erases the participation ofwomen and people of color from the movement. This style of argument, they argue, presents debatesabout tactics that are masked as debates about identity. Moreover, the tidy category of 'privilege'here merely functions to make everything they [white male activists] say or do illegitimate. Theseare all valid criticisms of Deluche's position. Deluche is in many way echoing (in my view) flawedarguments against tactics such as occupation, or the infamous Black Bloc, which see the use of a tacticas implying a certain social position or attitude, regardless of actual actors or circumstances.Nevertheless, regardless of the criticisms we might uphold of Deluche's expressed politics, he presentsus with a kind of cartographic dialectic of the ivory tower versus the ghetto.

This semester the universities received funding for education at the expense ofhealth care and the further privatization of the prison industrial complex. This isnot a victory. As I sit in a less crowded classroom, my mother sits in a morecrowded clinic wondering if she will be seen. It is crucial to demand that thestate takes this funding from the rich, from the oil, from challenging themilitary budget of the state and not from the poor, the oppressed, the sick, thevery community that I come from. As a student of color, from an impoverishedneighborhood, I see it as essential that I do not gain my degree at the expense ofmy community. My degree is for my community.67

To understand Deluche's criticisms of the whiteness of the student struggle, one shouldn't take a census.The student struggle only takes on its meaning in relation to the multitude of other struggles, and it is in

that relation that we find its limit. Bernes might be right that students represent a marginal figure in thecontext of university life; though supposedly central to its purpose, the student lacks the defined socialposition of even a casualised worker. Studenthood is a liminal state, between being ignorant andentering one's educated future. In the context of a financial crisis, that future can at times appearabsent. But as Blaumachen write, while the lumpenisation of wage labour has created many newpotential rioters, the effects are distributed with discrimination:

The production of the revolution is not a question of absolute immiseration.The crisis of proletarian reproduction is differentiated which means that it is acrisis in the reproduction of each part of the proletariat depending on themodalities of its reproduction, and at the same time a crisis of the stratification

within the proletariat. The latter is very important because this stratification is ahugely necessary element of the reproduction of restructured capitalism. Notonly has the social ladder been blocked, but everybody is being pusheddownwards. This results in each part trying to erect barricades to protect theirposition on the ladder and prevent their downfall.68

65 Deluche.66 Response to a critic of the 'white student movement.' occupyca.worpress, March 2010. Elipsis in original.67 Deluche.68 Blaumachen. The feral underclass hits the streets. blaumachen.gr, 5 October 2012. pdf 9.


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The absent future from which the Communiqu is written is a possible future, a tendency. In aneconomic crisis, it seems a strong possibility: tuition increases, and the possible pay-off of educationcrumbles. To those versed in Marxist economic theory, the possibility of never getting a real jobseems quite obvious. It is obvious to me. But the promissory note of a degree offers an alternativefuture, one that is perhaps not as rosy as we once believed it to be, but alternative nevertheless: thepossibility that as the economy declines one will be spared its worst ravages, which are reserved for the

uneducated starving masses, herded into ghettos, prisons, and immigrant detention centres. For as longas there is a breath of reality to these promises, many on the ladder will erect barricades against adownward movement. This is the limitation of the student movement: the student identity. Theoccupiers may have attained the status of problem students, disobedient students, perhaps evenrevolutionary students, but the circumstances which gave rise to the movement, i.e. the cuts toeducation, defined its identity, its practice, and its reach.

Perhaps a useful way to understand the dialectic of university and ghetto is through Freire'sconcept of the teacher-student dialectic. Paulo Freireclaims education is dominated by what he callsthe banking method: an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher isthe depositor.69 Both the student and knowledge are objectified in this process. The teacher andstudent occupy opposite poles of the teacher-student dialectic:

The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; byconsidering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. Thestudents, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept theirignorance as justifying the teacher's existence but, unlike the slave, they neverdiscover that they educate the teacher.70

Freire is writing right at the end of the post-war boom in an underdeveloped country. Following theinsurrectionists, the communisation current, and the operaisti we accept that education was subsumedwithin the dialectic of capital after the crisis of the 1970s. However, subsumption is not merereplacement. The teacher-student dialectic is alive and well, but its logic is no longer that of thepaternalistic gift which Freire says the Brazilian state gives to its peasants, but of the commodity. Itis not enough to say, as Freire does, that the banking concept of education works to further the interests

of the oppressors when it minimize[s] or annul[s] students' creative power and ... stimulate[s]credulity.71 Marx grasped the appearance of wealth as capital as signalling the emergence of a self-perpetuating, self-justifying relation. As capital subsumes education, the teacher and student becomeworkers and consumers in a productive process, and producting in a capitalist system must be measuredand must meet its quotas. Improving education is now considered synonymous with increasing variousquantities: standardised testing results, graduation rates, and the competitive ranking of teachers,schools, universities, and indeed countries. All of this tracks an immense commerce in certificationwhich eventually becomes not a measure of education, but education itself, in the same way that moneyis not simply a measure of wealth, but wealth itself:

The definition of a product as exchange value thus necessarily implies thatexchange value obtains a separate existence, in isolation from the product. The

exchange value which is separated from commodities and exists alongside themas itself a commodity, this is money. In the form ofmoney, all properties ofthe commodity as exchange value appear as an object distinct from it, as a formof social existence separated from the natural existence of the commodity.72

The drive towards outcomes is only one aspect of education's subsumption. The other effect is the

69 Pedagogy of the Oppressed53.70 Ibid. Okay, so, there are two.71 Pedagogy 54.72 Grundrisse 145.


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drive in education towards becoming a totalising social model. Like capital, education is a relationship,and the relation is not merely reproduced, it is produced on a steadily more massive scale, so that itcreates ever new supplies of workers and encroaches on branches of production previouslyindependent.73 Where once we might explain poverty by oppression, we now explain it as the effect ofpoor educational outcomes. Insofar as education is good coin, it is true: a poor education does not buyyou a good job. But scores on standardised tests are the result of oppression, not its cause. Calls to

expand educational access miss this vital point. It is not just that institutions of higher learning haveracist admissions policies (though, obviously, they do), but that the system through which one becomesa suitable candidate is structurally oppressive. A standardised test, more than anything else, serves asan accurate indicator of how poor and disenfranchised a community is; it is then used as thejustification for disenfranchisement. The educational system, as a whole, does not just produce theeducated: it produces the poor as uneducated. The student movement should be aware of how thislogic infiltrates its politics: by producing the student as privileged actor, and the university as aprivileged site of action. The Californian insurrection may have achieved the breakdown of somebarriers internal to the university, but the gap between the University and the ghetto, between Berkeleyand Oakland, remained, for the time, unbreached. Nor did distinct but harmonious uprisings in theUniversity and in the ghetto form the constellation of revolt for which the Communiqu, echoingTiqqun, dreamt. The collapse of the global economy, here and now? In practice, not quite true.

73 Capital1062.


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Conclusion

A true act creates the conditions of its own possibility.

Slavoj Zizek

________________________________________

In this paper I have striven to provide some account of the insurrectionary current which stirredCalifornia's student movement in 2009. From reading the Communiqu from an Absent Future I havetried to trace the geneology of this current to debates among the European ultra-left, and to locate itamong those contending theories. While an insurrectionary approach may not be entirely incompatiblewith an analysis founded in communization theory, as Bernes' position demonstrates, its call tovoluntaristic refusal fails to address the structures which generate our alienated subjectivities. Whilethe work ofTheorie Communiste may not provide as satisfyingly straightforward prescriptions foraction as The Coming Insurrection, nor the poetic accounts of existential despair of the insurrectionary

genre, it does provide us with language to describe the process by which radical movements exhausttheir potential. The moment of communization occurs at that limit, when the only way to preservethe struggle is to cut our ties to the very subject position which inspired our rebellion. And despite thebreadth and depth of the resistance to the cuts to education in California, it failed to surpass that limit.

The limits to voluntaristic refusal are harsh and violent. Despite Deluche's assurance that theoccupiers were protected by their white skin, the broken bones and court cases which followed theoccupations surely impressed upon even the palest of the radicals the limits of their style of action. Theshift in emphasis on the Occupy California blog is instructive: from calling for protests and occupationson University campuses, the blog has increasingly endorsed solidarity efforts with the movement inCalifornia's prisons.74 This, to me, indicates the necessary future of our movements: the prison, asinstitution and social metaphor. The ghetto is trapped in walls of poverty and marginalisation. TheLatin American war zone is trapped within borders, with billions going to man the walls. Is the radicalthe one that says We can turn this prison into a commune? Maybe. Maybe tomorrow. But for now,the radical figure of the moment is the escapee: the border-hopper, the jailbird, the dropout. Moten andHarney75 argue that this kind of marginality, the silent, fugitive zones at the fringes of the metropolitainspectacle, are sites of the production of resistance. Plan B, retreat, is now Plan A. You cannot simplydeclare the commune, the commune emerges in the dark corners of the world, beneath surveillinggazes. In those dark corners, what lessons might the equality of poverty produce?

74 See occupyca.wordpress, 20 January 2010; 30 September 2011; 9 July 2013; 13 July 2013.75 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. Debt and Study on eflux.com.


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Appendix 1: Not Enough; Reflections on Squatting

We dumpstered, squatted and shoplifted our lives back. Everything fell into place when we

decided our lives were to be lived.-a friend on Facebook, citation misplaced

________________________________________

if only things had stayed in place. But they continued to fall. The serendipity of theirarrangement was all too brief, and though there is an eternity which can be said to exist outside of time,which crystalises into our common inheritance, that is not the reality in which one lives. One lives in areality of bodies which stubbornly continue to ingest and shit, to desire, to freeze or overheat. Ourbodies are in motion. Until theyre not.

Stewed apples from the dumpster spiced with pilferred cinnamon and a mug of homebrewedwell moonshine, really. Such things will warm you for a while, and when you curl up in yoursleeping bag the crumbling graffitid walls around you are as good as any palace. But one morning youwake up smelling of puke. Its ice cold. Your stomach and your belly are crying out in pain. Shufflingacross the floorboards, desperate for coffee, you discover that no ones fetched more drinking water.So you curl up in the corner and try to make the scraps of your tobacco last for one more cigarettewhile you decide what to do.

Feed me, your body insists. Feed me now. You look around for a friend who might help youfeed your ailing body, but the house is silent. You curse them, you curse the happiness they seem tohoard in spite of you. You cant face the idea of crawling into a dumpster at 10 in the morning in thebitter cold, by yourself. You cant work up the necessary reckless courage to fill your bags withgroceries and walk boldly out of the shop. Not in your filthy, hungover, state, with a pounding head.And theres the problem of cigarettes.

Cigarettes will always remind us of our enslavement. Theyre never in the dumpsters. Theyrenever within reach of pilfering hands. Theyre never given quite so freely as zines on how to growpotatoes in old tires or the patches commemorating the band which existed for two gigs until that guyslept with that guys girlfriend. Your body demands you feed it cigarettes, and you remember you needmoney. Maybe youve got some, maybe you havent. But no matter how many other treasures you pileup, you still need money.

Fifteen minutes out of safety, shuffling hungover through the wealthy suburb, is all your feeblemind will take. Get to the 7-11. Cigarettes. Doritos. Coke. A chicken caesar wrap. Porn. Everythingthe body needs to endure this existence. Go home as quickly as you can. Feast. Fuck its cold. Whereis everyone?

Isolation causes vertigo. Dizzily, you no longer care from who you steal. Youre ready to turnon your friends now. Theyve left the drugs out. Theyve left the drugs out. Theyve left the drugsout. Theyre your drugs now. Drugs and cigarettes, everything the body needs. Chomping on adisgusting handful of mushrooms, you reach for the $10 box of wine (now nearly empty; you bought ityesterday) and replace the taste of dirt with one of vinegar. You catch sight of yourself in a mirror, andits enough to have you running to the toilet to vomit. Again. But no ones remembered to flush thetoilet (it takes considerable effort when you have to use rainwater) so you vomit on a pile of shit.Youre praying you havent vomited too much, and eat more mushrooms just to be on the safe side.But youve gone to the limit too many times; no amount of psychadelics will help you escape today.


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Why is it so cold? Where is everyone?

Its two in the morning now. You managed to secure more wine (you stopped caring about yourown stench after finishing the last box). You cant remember how many times youve vomited. Theystill havent woken up, or else theyve stayed in their room all day screwing while you freeze in thecorridor, barking at hallucinations. You set out lurching into the streets. Theres no amount of propertydamage that will extinguish your rage now, but you manage to exhaust yourself enough to curl up for

another night, cold, alone, and sick.

The knock on the door, the knock that says you have to leave, ruins everything that is left to beruined. Before you know it youre catching a ride in your friends car with all your scavangedpossessions in a pile behind you. No one speaks. Its raining. Youre tired and emaciated and haveforgotten what hot water feels like. Someone says that this time will be even better, and you force asmile, but no one believes it any more. Youre too tired. Too mad. Someone slept with someonesgirlfriend, the tired refrain. Someone never pitched in. Someone steals all the drugs (yeah, you; didyou take this for a commune?!). Someone is a total bitch. Someone is a total junkie. Someone gotbeat up. Its not going to work. You run.

You start running and you dont stop. You run to the friends you havent fucked over yet, to the

family youre still speaking to, to anyone who will let you bathe and sleep and not talk about it. Ifanyone gets too close, you fight them, no matter how well-meaning they are. Youre on the run andeveryones a threat. Then you run to landlords and employers and button-up shirts from savers. Yourun to doctors and therapists and synthesised wellbeing at much cheaper prices than your old dealers.You run like an animal because thats how you feel: youve become more in touch with your body, withhow it stinks and craves and freezes and breaks down, than you ever wanted to be.

Youre trying to put yourself back together, as best the world will let you. Youre trying not torun so hard, but they never let you stop. If we quit smoking, that wouldnt be a revolution. Wed stillbe cold and the shit would still be overflowing. You ride the train to work now, mostly sober, better-dressed but still muttering incessantly, this is not enough. This is not enough. This is not enough.


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Appendix 2: On uni requirements

If we shadows have offended, think but this and all is mended.Puck

________________________________________

I need to hand this in now, not tomorrow, not when I have the energy. I've got a disability. I'vegot childcare commitments. I've got psychological issues to address: my embodiment in colonialismand patriarchy. I've got books to read that I can't cite here. I've got things to say which aren't on thissubject. I have moves to make! So I've come to a few decisions for the immediate term.

First, no more proofreading. My best proofreader is already pissed off I've blown off her kidTHREE TIMES for this stupid paper. You think I'm going to risk getting my head bitten off (again) forthe sake of your ease in reading? Just pray I run spellcheck. If you're lucky, I'll even think up a bettertitle, but to be honest you're probably not. Second, you get appendix 1, a brief acount of my

experiences with insurrection. Fazal also asked me to reign in the cynicism, but when I was finishedediting out the snide comments I was 2,000 words under the word count. I don't have time to write2,000 words. In a way I feel like submitting that might be a weird insurrectionary act: an absurdgesture which declares itself political. And it doesn't escape the boundaries it criticises: it declares adesire to flight; it has no ideas. But to say that, and have done with this damn thesis, is the best flightI'll get right now.

Finally, I am taking my own approach to bibliography. I've divided it into three sections. Thefirst section is sources freely available online. Here, I reckon that every style guide to citing internetsources was written in the 1990s. In those days, there were no publication standards; documents couldnot be expected to be consistently reproduced or maintained over time, or securely archived. So you

have all these disgusting bibliographies with:The name of the owners of the website (1992). An article. THE NAME OF THE WEB SITE AGAINOH GOD WHY WE ALREADY KNOW WHAT THE BBC IS. http://www.somearchive.com.somewhere/)

()!#%specialcharacters/session=firefox/location=cia%20training

%20facility/favouritecolour=lavender/viewingforcheapcomputers.asdf, accessed 15 August 2013 at2:04 AM because I left my references to the last minute like everyone does.

Blue text and all. I've worked in a print shop. I've seen the horrors. The fact is that publishingstandards have been established; the works I cite have been published and republished, archived, e-mailed, swapped, printed and distributed, and reprinted because the cat pissed on them (that's a turn ofphrase; I haven't lived with a cat in three years). So my bibliographical convention will be simple:author, year of publication (if known; that's its own appendix), title, and an elegantly formatted URL or

Google search phrase to where I got my copy, in case you actually care about page numbers. Thiswon't be the URL for the document itself, it will be the URL for the archive. I will tell you the link toclick. You will survive. After that, I give some pretty standard references in a format no one has yelledat me for over the years. Finally, a rough draft of a bibliography, a standardless list of books on mybookshelf, which would have been the only thing I'd have submitted if Uncle Jon hadn't convinced methat was a meaningless and suicidal gesture. I've edited out the ones that elsewhere receive alternativecitation. Finally, several works mentioned in passing in text are not included in the list below, and areinstead cited more fully in situ.
http://www.somearchive.com.somewhere/)()!#%25specialcharacters/session=firefox/location=ciahttp://www.somearchive.com.somewhere/)()!#%25specialcharacters/session=firefox/location=ciahttp://www.somearchive.com.somewhere/)()!#%25specialcharacters/session=firefox/location=cia%20training%20facility/favouritecolour=lavender/viewingforcheapcomputers.asdfhttp://www.somearchive.com.somewhere/)()!#%25specialcharacters/session=firefox/location=cia%20training%20facility/favouritecolour=lavender/viewingforcheapcomputers.asdfhttp://www.somearchive.com.somewhere/)()!#%25specialcharacters/session=firefox/location=ciahttp://www.somearchive.com.somewhere/)()!#%25specialcharacters/session=firefox/location=ciahttp://www.somearchive.com.somewhere/)()!#%25specialcharacters/session=firefox/location=cia%20training%20facility/favouritecolour=lavender/viewingforcheapcomputers.asdfhttp://www.somearchive.com.somewhere/)()!#%25specialcharacters/session=firefox/location=cia%20training%20facility/favouritecolour=lavender/viewingforcheapcomputers.asdf


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Appendix 3:

Quotation from Multitude, handwriting mine, wall of East View House,photo credit William Pucci.

________________________________________


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Bibliography

It doesn't really matter, so long as you're consistent.Fazal Rizvi, supervisor.

________________________________________

Primary internet sources:

After the Fall: Communiques from Occupied California.Available from afterthefallcommuniques.info

The Coming Insurrection.Page numbers refer to pdf from tarnac9.wordpress, but available in all good squats.

Communiqu from an absent Future.

Included inAfter the Fall, but discerning readers will use the original printible .pdfbooklet available from wewanteverything.wordpress, September 2009.

Discount Tents, a.ka. Communization and its discontents, edited by Benjamin Noys.76

Available from minorcompositions.info, November 2011.

Also:

The Institute for Experimental Freedom

politicsisnotabanana.com.Libcom

libcom.org.Marxist Internet Archive

marxists.org.

And then there's:

Paulo Freire (1996). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin Books.Micael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2005). Multitude. Penguin Books.Karl Marx:

(1990). Capital: Volume 1. Penguin Books.(1973). Grundrisse. Penguin Books in assocation with New Left Review.

Antonio Negri (1991). Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. Autonomedia/Pluto.

And the rest of my bookshelves:

Seamus Heaney. Beowulf.Teach yourself. Quick fix Spanish Grammar.Badiou. Second Manifesto for Philosophy.Christopher Marlowe. Complete Plays.Funk and Wagnall's Standard Dictionary.

76 Spellcheck run. You're welcome for the two actual spelling errors it picked up. These are the last words of my MTeach.Time to explain the running joke. Discount tents refers to a pun Pucci made about how he felt that winter he lived in atent in someone's back yard. Guess I like a good joke, or a good story, over good research practice. Oh well.


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David Harvey. The Condition of Postmodernity.Ira Shor. When Students Have Power.Stanley Aronowitz. Against schooling: for an education that matters.Walter Benjamin. Illuminations.Aronowitz & Cutler. Post-Work.Mary Douglas. Natural Symbols.

Shakespeare. A Merchant of Venice.Claude Levi-Strauss. The Savage Mind.Mary Douglas. Purity and Danger.Dauv and Martin. The eclipse and re-emergence of the communist movement. Antagonism

Press.Guattari & Negri. Communists like us. On indefinite loan from Jura Book shop, Petersham,

Sydney.Antonio Negri. Time for Revolution.Deleuze and Guattari. Anti-Oedipus.Machiavelli. The Art of War.Foucault. Ethics.Ivan Illich. Deschooling society.Paul Willis. Learning to Labour.Marx. Early Writings. Black penguin edition.Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.Rosemary Sutcliff. The High Deeds of Finn Mac Cool.S. Eric Meretzky. Zork 2: The Malifestro Quest.Braudel. History of the Mediterranean, Pt 1.Ursula Le Guin. The Eye of the Heron.Levi-Strauss. Tristes Tropiques.A.R. Myers. England in the Late Middle Ages. Pelican History of England.Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Pelican book. With an

introduction by A.J.P. Taylor, which I can't say I've read.Sartre. Nausea.Burke. Reflections on the Revolution in France.Marx. Surveys from Exile.Zizek. The universal exception.Master Nymbal and Son's Cartographers' and Stationers' (M.Y. 386).Map of Southwest

Greymane. City of the Moon, Principality of Corellanth.Negri. Books for Burning.Federici. Caliban and the Witch.Mitropoulos. Contract and Contagion.Burnett. Christain Hebraism in the Reformation Era (1500-1600).Lacan. Ecrits.

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